The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?

In The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia UP, 2023), Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism— storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.

Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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In Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own.

From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Dr. Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Dr. Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830, the period known as the long eighteenth century. It uncovers the various experiences of women, whether mistresses, adulteresses or those involved in the sex trade. From renowned courtesans to downtrodden streetwalkers, Julie Peakman examines the multifaceted lives of these women within brothels, on stage and even behind bars.

Based on new research into court transcripts, asylum records, magazines, pamphlets, satires, songs, theatre plays and erotica, we learn of the gruesome treatment of women who were sexually active outside of marriage. Dr. Peakman looks at sex from women’s points of view, undercutting the traditional image of the bawdy eighteenth century to expose a more sordid side, of women left distressed, ostracised and vilified for their sexual behaviour.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quackery, Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain (The History Press, 2023) by Dr. Jessica Cox is the untold history of pregnancy and childbirth in Victorian Britain.

During the nineteenth century, having children was frequently viewed as a woman’s central function and destiny – and yet the pregnant and postnatal body, as well as the birthing room, are almost entirely absent from the public conversation and written histories of the period. Confinement corrects this omission by exploring stories of pregnancy and motherhood across this period. Drawing on a range of contemporary sources, Dr. Cox charts the maternal experiences of women, examining fertility, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, maternal mortality, unwanted pregnancies, infant loss, breastfeeding, and postnatal bodies and minds.

From the royal family to inhabitants of the workhouse, this absorbing history reveals what motherhood was truly like for the women of nineteenth-century Britain.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The engaging memoir of a legendary president of Wellesley College known for authentic and open-hearted leadership, who drove innovation with power and love. The Claims of Life: A Memoir (The MIT Press, 2023) traces the emergence of a young woman who set out believing she wasn’t particularly smart but went on to meet multiple tests of leadership in the American academy—a place where everyone wants to be heard and no one wants a boss. In college, Diana Chapman met Chris Walsh, who became a towering figure in academic science. Their marriage of fifty-seven years brought them to the forefront of revolutions in higher education, gender expectations, health-care delivery, and biomedical research. 

The Claims of Life offers readers an unusually intimate view of trustworthy leadership that begins and ends in self-knowledge. During a transformative fourteen-year Wellesley presidency, Walsh advanced women’s authority, compassionate governance, and self-reinvention. After Wellesley, Walsh’s interests took her to the boards of five national nonprofits galvanizing change. She kept counsel with Nobel laureates, feminist icons, and even the Dalai Lama, seeking solutions to the world’s climate crisis. With an ear tuned to social issues, The Claims of Life is an inspiring account of a life lived with humor, insight, and meaning that will surely leave a lasting impression on its readers.

Diana Chapman Walsh is President Emerita of Wellesley College and an emerita member of the governing boards of MIT and Amherst College. She was a trustee of the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and the Mind and Life Institute, and also chaired the Broad Institute's inaugural board and cofounded the Council on the Uncertain Human Future.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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In Cambodia, the government and civil society organisations have paid significant attention to Gender-based Violence and Harassment, within both the domestic sphere and, increasingly, in the workplace context. A major driver behind this increased scrutiny of GBVH issues is the presence of international donors in Cambodia, and an expectation that international norms will be implemented in-country through policies and actions.

Whilst greater attention of GBVH in Cambodia is both needed and welcome, there is also the question of how to address these issues effectively. Guests Professor Michele Ford and Vichhra Mouyly argue, to effectively eliminate GBVH from the workplace, we need to closely examine the way work is organised and controlled – to look at the day-to-day interactions on the production floor, and how the way in which work is managed contributes to the incidence of GBVH. They’re thinking about these issues in the context of Cambodia’s construction industry, and share their research on women’s experiences of GBVH in this sector.

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In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Leon-Boys explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture model, Dr. Leon-Boys teases out moments of complex negotiations by Disney, producers, and audiences as they navigate Elena’s circulation. Case studies highlight how a flexible Latinidad is deployed through corporate materials, social media pages, theme park experiences, and the television series to create a princess who is both marginal to Disney’s normative vision of princesshood and central to Disney’s claims of diversification.

This multi-layered analysis of Disney’s mediated Latina girlhood interrogates the complex relationship between the U.S.’s largest ethnic minority and a global conglomerate that stands in for the U.S. on the global stage.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) examines the processes by which modern authors and filmmakers reshape these traditional tales to develop new narratives that interrogate the ingrained patriarchal paradigm. Through a rigorous analysis, Wang delineates changes in both content and narrative that allow contemporary interpretations to reimagine the gender politics and contexts of the tales retold. With a broad transmedia approach and a nuanced understanding of intertextuality, this work contributes to the ongoing negotiation in academic and popular discourse between past and present, traditional and contemporary, and text and reality in a globalized and postmodern world. Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters offers an engaging interdisciplinary investigation of issues at the heart of these traditional tales such as gender and status hierarchy, marriage and family life, and in-group/out-group distinction. Beyond the content of these individual stories, Wang ties these narratives together across time using cognitive literary criticism, especially affective narratology, to shed new light on the adaptation of literary and cultural texts and their sociopolitical contexts.

Dr. Cathy Yue Wang is a lecturer in Department of Chinese Language and Literature, School of Humanities, Shanghai Normal University in China. She received her PhD from Macquarie University in Australia. She is particularly interested in applying feminist and queer perspectives into examinations of adaptation and retelling, children and young adult literature, as well as boys’ love subculture and fandom in the East Asian context. She is the author of Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) and editor of Catching Chen Qing Ling: The Untamed and Adaptation, Production, and Reception in Transcultural Contexts (Peter Lang, forthcoming).

Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.

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What does the Miss Tibet beauty pageant tell us about what it means to be Tibetan in a globalized world? And what understandings of Tibetan culture does it convey? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Pema Choedon about representations of Tibet and Tibetan culture on the global stage from the vantage point of the Miss Tibet beauty pageant. While such pageants are often thought of as an example of “low-brow culture” and a site of women’s objectification by the male gaze, Choedon shows how one can also see them as arenas where cultural meanings are produced, consumed, and rejected, and where local and global, and ethnic and national cultural forms are engaged and showcased.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

Pema Choedon holds a PhD degree from the University of Tartu in Estonia, with a thesis on the construction of Tibet in the diaspora.

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In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality.

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China’s communist revolution has an intricate relationship with gender and religion. In Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023), Xiaofei Kang moves the two themes to the center stage in the Chinese Revolution. It examines the Communist Party’s first anti-superstition campaign in its wartime headquarters of Yan’an, the holy land of the Maoist revolution. The book argues that religion was not a mere adversary for the revolution; it also served as a model with which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In its rise from rural backwaters to national dominance, the Party attacked “superstitions” that had supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted the same religious resources for its own political ends. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order. Furthermore, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new hegemonic vision of the Party-state endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution. The interplay of religion, gender, and revolution holds historical and contemporary significance of the Maoist legacy in contemporary China. It also offers insights into the transformative power of propaganda in global politics.

Xiaofei Kang is Professor in the Department of Religion at the George Washington University. Her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014).

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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